This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Online education offers the potential to greatly expand the reach of today's educational institutions, both by providing a wider range of educational resources to enrolled students and by making educational resources available through adult education programs to persons who are not formally enrolled in a college or university.
Testing is an important and necessary component of any educational program, and online educational programs are no exception. The mechanics of testing the student's knowledge become problematic with online programs because, with no human proctor present, there is no reliable way to ensure against cheating. When tests are administered in a controlled and proctored environment, such as in a classroom, the students can be monitored by a human proctor during the test. However, in online programs there may be no convenient way to provide the human proctor.
The same is true in testing situations outside the educational environment. For example governmental examinations and professional certification examinations also currently require a human proctor to ensure against cheating. The need for a human proctor increases the cost of testing and often restricts the venues available where testing can be administered. Limitations imposed by cost and available venue may dictate that a test be administered only at limited times. This places a burden on the student and limits the frequency with which testing can be performed.
To illustrate, in a government program designed to assess the skills and aptitudes of an entire population, testing may be practical only at selected time intervals, such as for example, once a year, for students entering high school that year. If testing could be conducted in a more distributed and frequent fashion, it would be possible to obtain a more granular and accurate assessment of the skills and aptitudes of the student population. With such more granular and accurate assessment the educational process could be more finely controlled. Current cost and venue demands make this impractical.